VISIONS
by Clifford Harper

OK, so my first pick isn’t actually a book, but so what? It was 1978, not long after I’d left school, when I discovered Anarchist artist Clifford Harper’s utopian ‘Visions’ series of graphics in a little alternative bookshop tucked away in a Brighton back street. The basement walls were decorated with six A3 posters consisting of lovingly detailed line illustrations of what a post-revolutionary society might look like. Depicting community run printing and light industrial workshops, solar and wind powered housing estates and publicly controlled radio and TV stations, they were yellowing and dog eared, belonging to an optimistic age of counter-culture that was unfashionable at the pre-dawn of the Thatcher era. 

But for me they were an epiphany, especially the image of the Collectivised Terrace – an ordinary street in any town or city where the fences dividing previously private and isolated back yards have been removed, with the resulting open spaces turned into productive plots of vegetables, fruit bushes, chicken houses, cold-frames and bee hives managed by urban farmers and libertarian communards.

Thatcher’s hardline ‘there is no such thing as society’ agenda was just around the corner and already looming large in the public consciousness. But this was a positive glimpse of another way, how things could be, revealing both the enormous potential of the power of community, and the urban food growing space available by applying just a little common sense, co-operation and imagination to what surrounds us.

All it takes is a small shift in our perceptions to see that we all have the power to create better times for ourselves and each other. Maybe this is subversive talk, but who needs supermarkets and agro-chemicals when according to the SAFE Alliance, London alone has some 1.4 million households with gardens, 1388 ha of derelict land, 53,600 ha of protected open space, 14,411 ha of agricultural land plus school playgrounds, rooftops and parks?

‘Radical Technology’, the book from which these posters were originally culled, is long out of print.